How to maintain brand consistency after a rebrand

Maintaining brand consistency after a rebrand is important, but it isn’t always straightforward. Not only will team members need to use the brand’s new assets in their day-to-day activities, everyone representing your business will need to be on-board with the new guidelines.

Failure to maintain brand consistency could result in a lack of clear identity, a poor brand message, confusion amongst both staff and clients, and reduced recognition and authority in the industry.

If you’ve recently gone through a rebrand, or you’re about to, one question you may be asking yourself is: How can I get rid of those old brand assets and make sure everyone is using the new ones consistently?

In this guide, we’ll give you four action steps you can take to ensure all staff are on-board with the new brand, along with some quick-fire ways to supercharge your new look.

Publish brand guidelines

Making the decision on whether or not your brand is ready for a refresh isn’t easy, and nor is the process of going through a rebrand. Once you have, you’ll want to make sure it was worth it.

The first step you should take is to publish a central set of brand guidelines.

Your designer should provide you with brand guidelines (usually as a PDF or in a similar eBook format) that outline the essential elements of your new look, voice and style.

Having a document like this will help ensure all members of staff are singing from the same hymn sheet and not making their own interpretations of your new branding.

Complete brand guidelines that enforce consistency should include:

Color palettes

Fonts

Logo patterns

Tone of voice

But, while it’s all well and good to create guidelines, beware of allowing the document to slide to the unexplored archives of a desktop folder that no one ever looks at.

Store your new brand guidelines centrally using a digital asset manager (DAM). With a cloud platform, you can store your brand guidelines and all those new assets in one central location, where in-house sales and marketing teams can access them whenever they’re needed.

Make these guidelines easy to implement

When it comes to creating branded documents, it’s not uncommon for branding experts to rush ahead and create something that looks incredible but just isn’t practical.

Choose a designer who doesn’t think about accessibility, and you might be left with a brand identity that relies on unique fonts being installed on every single machine, or logos that can only be viewed with complex software.

Using a browser-based brand management tool, like Lucidpress, can help solve this problem though. Storing all your brand assets on a platform where they can be easily accessed by each team member – whether they are on the design team or the sales team – will make it easier to successfully implement your guidelines. This way everyone will automatically have access to updated files too.

Create on-brand templates

Can you relate to the frustration of waiting weeks for designers to produce graphics?

A rebrand is stressful enough. You don’t need the added pressure of long turnaround times for new branded content.

Instead of asking your team to wait on designers, try asking your designers to create templates for the types of content they create most frequently. This will allow your in-house teams to create sales and marketing collateral without needing help from a designer each time.

Such templates could include key features like logos, fonts, shapes and colours, with space for sales and marketing to add their own text or images.

Asking designers to create templates instead of complete graphics will make turnaround times shorter and allow in-house teams get to grips with your new branding quicker.

Lock-down those key brand elements

Once you’ve asked a designer to create custom templates as part of your rebrand, you’ll need to make sure that they’re editable – but not completely customizable.

When you lock down brand assets in your templates, every member of your team can have access to them, but you’ll have ultimate control over their permissions. This means you can give designers more control, allowing them to lock down those essential elements on each design.

Your sales and marketing teams will still be able to change some of the content used in these templates, but locking down key brand elements like logos and fonts will ensure consistency throughout.

Go the extra mile to drive home the new brand

After you’ve taken steps to keep your new brand consistent, it’s time to ramp up its visibility.

1. Use branded links for an extra boost

You can put your brand name on show with each link you share by using a custom URL shortener like Rebrandly. It can transform long URLs into snappy and memorable vanity links, improving the visibility of your new brand.

These links can also increase click-through rates by as much as 39%. That could mean a lot more people visiting your website from something as simple as using a custom URL.

2. Invest in great visuals

Marketing and promoting your business is likely to be high on your priority list – especially with your fancy new branding. You want to get the word out and show-off those new assets, right?

Investing in great visuals can help you do this effectively. As just one example of how visuals can help make your content more appealing, it’s worth remembering that tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than those without.

Once you’ve rebranded, ask your designer to create on-brand templates to be used on social media. You could transform the following into a graphic:

Then, provide your teams with a bank of quality photos to use when they’re customizing the templates.

3. Appoint a brand champion

The final step in supercharging the success of your recent rebrand is to appoint a brand champion.

This is a person in your company who has the primary responsibility for educating the team on why brand consistency is important, and the first point-of-call for any brand-related questions your staff may have. Most often, it’s the CMO or another marketing executive.

The brand champion in your company should also monitor the use of your new branded assets and aim to make it easier for everyone to follow the guidelines.

Key takeaways

After rebranding, it’s important to avoid confusion among consumers by ensuring full consistency across your various communications platforms, from your website to each social media channel.

While it’s not always easy to maintain brand consistency, there are some practical steps you can take after a rebrand to make sure your company adjusts to its new image.

It’s a good idea to use cloud-based design software to create templates that can be accessed by all members of your team, no matter where they are. This will ensure everyone is sharing content with your most up-to-date branding.

Beyond consistency, it’s essential to boost awareness of your new identity in any way you can. Whether you create on-brand links or design eye-catching visuals, any way you can get your new brand in front of your audience will make them more familiar with it.

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This post has been written by a guest author who will be the best source for any questions you may have about the content. If you're interested in writing a guest post for Rebrandly please email katie[@]Rebrandlydotcom with a description of your background and for a copy of our guest-posting guidelines.